


All I Want For Christmas

by sunalso



Series: Heaven & Earth [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Christmas Fluff, Eye Color, F/M, France (Country), Happy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-27 05:05:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17155832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunalso/pseuds/sunalso
Summary: Soulmate AU. Jemma, who can't see the color blue, is driving to Paris on Christmas Eve when her car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. Serendipitously, Fitz, who can't see brown, is staying at a nearby home and stops to help her, but it's not until they're inside and he flips the lights on that they realize they were always meant to find each other.A Christmas present for my wonderful beta, Gort!Beta'd by Libbyweasly.





	All I Want For Christmas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gort](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gort/gifts).



It was snowing.

Bloody terrific.

Jemma sighed and brushed the hair off her forehead as she checked her mobile’s GPS, hoping that the shortcut she was taking through the French countryside in her two-door coupe would pay off. It was impossible to see anything in the dark. She’d gotten a late start from London, had a choppy channel crossing, and was now driving towards Paris on Christmas Eve.

It was a far cry from the excitement of her childhood during this time of year, but she’d already spent a few days with her parents and now planned to get a head start on a presentation she would be making right after the New Year. Working as a chemist for a major cosmetic company was often an exercise in frustration as it seemed what ideas were accepted and who management favored changed daily on a whim.

It wasn’t Jemma’s dream job, not by a long shot, but it turned out not being able to see the color blue was a significant handicap for a chemist. It didn’t matter that she could usually discern changes in the grey that indicated reaction completion. She was still grey-blue colorblind and would require accommodations at work, so despite her impressive credentials, finding work wasn’t that easy.

There was probably also prejudice against her for having a soulmate, the reason she couldn’t see blue, but that was not the sort of thing anyone said explicitly. There was just the common misconception that she would find this person and suddenly want to do nothing but have babies. It was preposterous. She could be a mother and an excellent employee, and that was only if she ever even found the man or woman fate had matched her with.

Jemma peered through the windscreen as the snow started to come down harder. Her headlights reflected off it as it eddied across the road. Maybe she should have stuck to the well-traveled routes instead of thinking she could shave off a few minutes by going through the middle of nowhere. Even if she couldn’t see them in the dark, she knew there were vineyards and empty fields surrounding her.

Feeling suddenly lonely, she turned up the radio to hum along with the song playing.

_All I want for Christmas is you._

There was a loud pop from the front of the car, followed by the grinding of metal on metal. Jemma gritted her teeth and took her foot off the gas. The brakes were still working, and she wrenched the car over to the shoulder as all the electronics went dead, cutting off the end of the song.

She sat for a moment as the engine hissed.

“Crap, crap, crap!” The last was punctuated with a slap at the steering wheel. Grabbing her mobile, she unlocked the screen to call for assistance.

She didn’t have signal.

Her chest constricted. She was completely alone, not on her normal route into Paris, it was below freezing, snowing, and her mobile wasn’t working.

Jemma took a deep breath and let it out. She had to focus. Being stuck wasn’t fun, but she’d be okay. She had emergency supplies in the boot, including food, water, and blankets.

Opening the car door, she cautiously got out. Snow immediately stuck to her jacket, and she pulled her grey hat out of her pocket and pulled it on.

She opened the bonnet and used the torch on her mobile to inspect the engine, but while she knew the parts of a combustion engine and basic maintenance, she also knew she did not have the skill set to repair whatever was wrong. Or even diagnose it.

Leaving the bonnet propped open, she retrieved the items she needed from the boot, including several old road flares. Popping the top on one, she set it a few meters behind her car. She didn’t want to be accidently hit by some drunken idiot in the middle of the night.

Back in her seat, she curled up under the heavy quilt and sighed. This was not going to help her get her proposal completed, though she supposed she could at least mentally start making checklists of what information she would need to present.

An hour later she was cold, had whittled down her ideas to the top twenty, and was growing increasingly alarmed at the amount of snow accumulating on the windscreen.

Jemma pulled the quilt tighter around her. She blinked as the car’s interior lit up with the headlights of another car. It was coming from behind, and she held her breath until it passed, worried it would hit her.

She worried more when the car turned around and pulled over right in front of hers. Absolutely anyone could be out here, and they might not be nice. Hopefully, whoever got out was here to help her.

The car’s lights were bright, and she held up a hand to block it from shining in her eyes. A man got out and hurried towards her side of the car. She couldn’t see him well, just his outline in the light. He was lean and not overly tall. She cracked open her door and stood.

“Hello!” he called. “You alright?” The Scottish lilt of his voice was surprising in the middle of France.

“I’m alright. My car isn’t.”

“Ah, a fellow countrywoman. I’m Leo Fitz, just call me Fitz, and let me take a look.” She nodded, and the snow crunched under his feet as he bent over her engine. She came and stood beside him, absurdly grateful for not being on her own. This Fitz made her feel entirely at ease, even if he was a stranger. He hunched over the engine, then sighed. “You’re not going anywhere for a bit.”

“I’m not?”

He reached out a strong looking hand and pointed at a hairline crack in her engine block she hadn’t noticed before. “This says no.”

She sighed.

“I’m sorry,” Fitz said, pulling his coat tighter around himself. “And mobiles don’t work for shite this far outside of town. The phone lines at my place are probably already down, and power will go out too once there’s enough ice on the lines.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, what are you doing way out here?” She turned to look at him, though his face was still heavily shadowed from the lights behind him and while she met his eyes, she couldn’t really see them. What she could make out of him was rather nice. He was a little scruffy, and his hair was cowlicked in twenty different directions, but he was very symmetrical, and his coat was a little tight across his shoulders in a way she highly approved of.

Fitz scratched his cheek. “Well, I’m a baker. I’m supposed to be opening my own place in Glasgow come the new year, and I needed to hole up and work on my recipes. I’ve been doing a lot of cutting-edge tech design when it comes to methods, and I didn’t want anyone to spy, so I had an early Christmas with my mum and came out her to stay at a little place owned by a friend of mine who’s off to warmer climes.” Her stomach growled at the mention of food, and she hoped he hadn’t heard. “What about you?”

“Well, let’s start at the beginning. I’m Jemma Simmons.” She held out her hand. His was deliciously warm when she shook it. She didn’t want to let go, but she could hardly stand there holding it like an idiot, so she dropped his hand and crossed her arms.

“Good to meet you, Jemma. I’m just returning from a last-minute supply run. If you want, you can come back to my place...” He trailed off and coughed. “Um, to where I’m staying. There’s an extra room, and I could use a taste tester for my latest batch of gingerbread.”

Jemma smiled at his faux pas. “That does sound lovely, thank you.” Gingerbread made by a professional would be much better than the mostly frozen granola bar she’d otherwise be eating while trying not to get frostbite in her car.

“At the risk of sounding even creepier, is anyone going to be frightened when you don’t get to where you were headed tonight?”

She laughed. “You’re not selling your company, but no. I also had Christmas with my parents early and was heading to my little flat, which is unfortunately not in one of the fashionable arrondissements, to pull together a proposal for a new manufacturing method for the bloody big company I work for. So it was just going to be me.”

“You married to the job, then?”

She rolled her eyes as she returned to her car to pull out her bags from the backseat. “I’ve had a Ph.D. in chemistry since I was fifteen, so yes, I enjoy my work.” Jemma decided to get the whole soulmate thing out of the way, in case he was one of those people that thought it was demonic or he was the sort of romantic that would never touch someone that had a destined partner. “And I can't get married. I have a soulmate I don’t know.”

“Oh, sorry. Me too.”

“You have a soulmate?” She was surprised. It was a trait only found in around fifteen percent of the population though fifteen percent of nearly eight billion people was still a lot.

“Yes, um, that. But also, I got my doctorate at fifteen, in mechanical engineering. It just turned out I was horrible at grant writing, no one would hire me because I was so young, and after several post-doc fellowships that went nowhere, I started baking to relieve stress. The rest is history.”

She stared at Fitz’s back as he took her bags and loaded them into his tiny black car. Jemma locked her car and hurried to get into the passenger side. He started the engine and went to back up, but the tires spun.

“Is the snow too deep?” she asked.

He sighed and nodded. “At least for reverse. Hang on.”

Fitz threw the car into gear, yanked on the steering wheel and gunned the engine. The car shot forward, barely missing hers, but they were unstuck.

She cheered and laughed. Fitz snorted. He turned around on the road, driving back past her very broken auto.

“It’s a good thing you broke down where you did. My turnoff is just up here.” He put his blinker on. “Past that and you would probably have sat all night in your car.”

“I had blankets and consumables. I would have been okay.”

“But then you wouldn’t have gotten fresh gingerbread.”

His shoulder bumped hers as they turned onto a tiny, one-lane road. Sparks raced across her skin from the contact. She was very off-kilter.

“That would have been a travesty.” Jemma glanced at Fitz from the corner of her eye. It was much too dark for her to see him properly, but she was starting to like him. Enough that going to this remote house with didn’t give her a blip of concern.  

“Actually, would you care to share your expertise as a chemist?” The car bounced over a pothole, and their shoulders touched again.

Her reply was slightly breathless. “I’d love to.”

“Wonderful! I’m trying to do some color extraction from fruits and need some ideas for an edible stabilizer, but hopefully, not a massed produced one. They can alter flavors.”

Please don’t be blue, she thought. “Do you have formulas for what you’re using?”

“Partial ones, but I was hoping you’d look at those too.”

Jemma smiled. “I certainly can.” Handsome, charming, respectful. Fitz was quite the catch. He’d probably be married with three kids by now if he didn’t have a soulmate out there somewhere.

She tried not to think about it, gazing instead out the windscreen at the snow-covered vegetation. The entire world seemed colored black and white.

“It’s just up here,” Fitz said. “And I should warn you: my friends are very into Christmas. They place looks like Santa’s bloody workshop. You go in first, and I’ll turn on the holiday lights for maximum effect.”

“Just so you know, that also sounds creepy.”

“Shite, sorry!” He paused. “It is really impressive.”

“I can’t wait.”

They turned between two hedgerows, down a short lane, and Fitz pulled up in front of a quaint fieldstone cottage. She got out, and he handed her bags to her before getting his groceries from the boot.

As promised, he unlocked the door and let her in first. The room was dark, and she set her bags down, just able to make out the outline of a Christmas tree. The air smelled heavily of gingerbread and her mouth watered.

“Ready?” Fitz asked.

“Go for it.”

A switch clicked, and the place lit up. Jemma gasped. There were lights everywhere. The tree was huge, stockings hung from the mantle, and garlands and bows adorned every available surface. Music started playing from hidden speakers.

“It’s amazing. But…Mariah Carey?”

“Mack picked the music,” he said with a sigh.

“It was what was playing when my car broke down.” Odd coincidence, that.

She hummed along— _I don’t want a lot for Christmas_ —as she inspected the display. A string of old-fashioned big bulb Christmas lights caught her eye. They were draped over a side table, and there was something odd about them, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

Red, green, yellow, orange…her mind went blank. The last one wasn’t the light grey she was familiar with. It had a color. Something clicked in her mind and she figured out what she was seeing.

It was blue.

She grabbed her hat off her head letting her hair tumble around her shoulders as she tried to put together the implications. Her hat was no longer grey either, but a light…blue. She set it down as her gaze returned to the light.

“I’m going to turn the regular lights on,” Fitz said.

She nodded, staring at the cheerfully glowing blue bulb.

The room’s lights came up, and Fitz squeaked. “Jemma! Your hair!” He crossed the room quickly, and she turned to face him.

In the light, he was even more attractive, and his eyes were a brilliant blue that outshone the bulb. He wrapped a strand of her hair around his fist and held it up. His hand was shaking.

“Your hair,” he said again. “It’s…it’s…”

“It’s brown,” Jemma whispered. “Like my eyes.”

His gaze met hers. “Oh fuck. You…you…” His face drained of color. “I think I’m going to pass out.” Fitz swayed on his feet.

“None of that. Sit.” She hung onto his arm and helped him drop to the floor. Tears were streaming down his face, and Jemma was struggling to think past the huge, overwhelming outpouring of emotion that was swamping her.

“It’s you.” He whimpered. “I’ve been waiting my whole life…and…and…” He broke off and shook.

Jemma crawled into his lap, and he hugged her close. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay. We found each other.”

“But we almost didn’t.” His hand sunk back into her hair. “A surprise storm, your car breaking down right before my turnoff, the fact I even went out today was because I dropped a bag of confectioner’s sugar and needed to get more. I could have missed you.”

Jemma, who absolutely had scoffed at the notion of fate since she had understood what it was, felt suddenly calm. That was too many coincidences. “If the dry cleaners had been faster, I would have been on an earlier ferry. If I hadn’t accepted a ridiculous job I didn’t really want, I wouldn’t even have been driving to Paris. But I was, and you were. We were meant to find each other.”

Fitz leaned his forehead against hers. “Yeah?”

“Yes,” she confirmed, wiping his cheeks with her palm. “We are quite obviously compatible.”

Fitz’s eyes slid closed, and he pressed his lips to hers.

Oh, yes, very compatible.  

His lips tasted sweet. She nipped at the lower one, and he deepened the kiss as Mariah Carey crooned in the background. She swept her tongue over his, and he moaned. They fit together perfectly. She’d never felt like she was missing a part of herself, but now it was like she’d just found out she could fly.

Her stomach growled, loudly.

Fitz broke the kiss even though she tried to follow his lips with hers.

“When did you last eat?” he said, looking aghast.

“I had tea…at breakfast time.”

He looked even more aghast. “What? You need to eat!” She hopped off his lap as he scrambled to his feet. “What do you want? I can make you anything. I’m a great baker, but I can cook too. Just let me know.”

“Let's start by putting the groceries away. And I can probably make—”

“N-no, I…” He shifted his weight from foot to foot, and his fingers wiggled by his side. “I need to take care of you.”

Warmth bloomed in her chest. Jemma had read a great deal on the experience of being bonded to your soulmate, including the urge to protect and care for them, but to see that instinct play out as her soulmate wanting to feed her made her feel very…loved.

Oh, cripes, she loved him, and she didn’t even know him.

“Okay.” She held her hand out and he took it, leading her to the kitchen. It was huge and immaculate with shining top-end stainless-steel appliances, an enormous fridge, two cooking surfaces, and countertops she thought were made of gneiss.

There were wire racks of gingerbread men set out on a side counter.

“Nice, isn’t it?” Fitz was beaming. Jemma nodded in agreement. Together they stowed the groceries, and Jemma was very pleased to find that Fitz had an organizational system that was meticulous and exactly how she would have done it.

What better evidence that they were meant to be together?

“What would you like?” he asked, leaning a hip against the counter.

She opened the cavernous fridge. “I think a salad if you don’t mind, and since you have the ingredients, I’ll make you my go-to sandwich.”

Fitz raised a brow. “I thought I was one doing the making.”

“You are, of the salad. Don’t forget I also need to take care of you.”

His grin was goofy. “Then it’s an excellent plan. I’m glad I remembered romaine lettuce.” She grabbed what she needed and set it on the counter while Fitz headed to the sink to rinse the lettuce and veggies. The garlic press was right where she expected it to be, much to her satisfaction. They both worked in silence.

She completed hers just as Fitz was shaking something in a container with what sounded like a ball bearing inside it. He noticed her puzzled look. “It’s like a whisk,” he said. “I couldn’t possibly serve you store-bought dressing, so I’m making you a raspberry vinaigrette.”

“I’m very impressed.”

Fitz smiled shyly.

Jemma hopped up to sit on the counter beside where Fitz was putting the final touches on the bowls of salad. He handed her one  with a fork. She took a bite and moaned. “This is amazing. You are amazing. I think I won the soulmate lottery.”

Fitz’s mouth was full of salad, but he reached over and wrapped a strand of her hair around his finger. When he could talk again, he gently tugged at her hair. “This is my favorite color now.”

“Brown?”

He pointed to part of the strand. “This shade, right here. I don’t even know if it has a name, but it’s beautiful.”

“I feel like you missed out on a lot more than I did. There’s not much that’s blue—I noticed some labels, and the jeans you're wearing look less drab than I’m used to, but there are so many different shades of brown.”

“Jemma, the sky is blue.”

“Oh.” She hadn’t even thought of that. “That’s always been…an intellectual fact I’ve known. How very exciting to know the entire world is going to look different tomorrow.”

“The entire world already looks different.” He was gazing at her, and her stomach flipped.

She set her salad down, and he did the same before tracing his fingers up her thigh. She moaned, and he moved to stand between her knees.

Jemma became very aware that she was probably going to have her clothes off before much longer. “Sandwich first, I went to all that trouble to make pesto aioli. And there’s really just a hint of it, but I think you’ll approve.”

She held up a half of a sandwich and Fitz, still gazing at her face, leaned in and took a bite. His eyes got very wide as he chewed.

“That’s delicious!” He took the rest and bit off a huge bite.

She giggled and ate her own.

Finishing the first half, he devoured the other as well. “I’ve never…that was perfect. Are you sure you want to keep working for whoever it is you work for?”

“What else would I do?”

He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, then cupped her cheek. “I was planning to postpone opening the place I was telling you about, go with you to Paris while we figure things out, because the current space I’m in the middle of trying to rent is really too big and frankly, I refuse to be without you ever again.”

“Fitz.” She put her arms around his neck and urged him closer with her heel on his bum. “Me either. You are the best present I’ve ever received. But I don’t want to stall your plans.”

He shook his head. “Mine are easier to stall, unless… He licked his lips and leaned in close. “Unless you want to quit the rat race. We could have a bakery and sandwich shop. I’ve got some great ideas for fish and chips as well.”

Jemma gazed into his eyes, which were a color she’d never dreamed of, but that she’d now happily wake up to every morning for the rest of her life. A place of their own. A life of their own. Her heart had already decided. “Oh no,” she said, breaking into laughter. Fitz frowned as she put her head on his shoulder. “I’m a stereotype. A statistic.”

“What?”

“Yes, Fitz. I’ll send in my letter of resignation tomorrow, and we can draw up plans for our bakery and sandwich shop. Maybe we can call it Chemistry?”

“I’d like that.” He hugged her.

“Anyway, I’ve done what I always said I wouldn’t because it’s what you see in the movies. I’ve known my soulmate only a few hours, and already I want to dump my corporate job to create our own little place…and maybe our own little family.”

Fitz inhaled sharply. “Oh, Jemma. Yes.” He nuzzled her. “And it doesn’t matter what anyone else bloody thinks. The only person you have to answer to is yourself.”

She gazed at the person who’d shifted the trajectory of her entire life in less than a night. “Do you think we can practice the family creating now?” she asked. Jemma raised her head to find him grinning and fingering her hair again.

“What about the gingerbread?”

“Later.”

“You sure? It looks much more appetizing to me now that it’s not a murky grey.”

She laughed. “Later. I have other hair that’s brown.”

Fitz made the sweetest little noise of need.

As their lips met, the Christmas music from the living room switched from Carol of the Bells back to Mariah Carey.

Jemma held her soulmate tighter.

Fitz was indeed all she wanted for Christmas.


End file.
